These amazing deep space images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, have lain hidden in data vaults. That was until the European Space Agency opened them up to the public, invited skywatchers and awarded prizes to the top ten entries.

Josh Lake of the United States won with this awesome image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is almost twice the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy, about 170,000 light-years across! Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away. This multiwavelength view of this large spiral galaxy, is a composite of images recorded by space-based telescopes in the 21st century. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, JPL, CaltechSTScI

Our neighbor Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31), 2.5 million light-years away and spanning some 260,000 light-years. It took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way emerged from a computer simulation of the physics involved in galaxy formation and evolution.

Those aren’t insects trapped in a spider’s web — they’re stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, lying between us and another spiral galaxy called IC 342. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this picture in infrared light, revealing the galaxy’s bright patterns of dust.

ESO astronomers have used the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope to capture an image of NGC 6744. This impressive spiral galaxy lies about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). But this view could almost be a picture postcard of our own Milky Way, taken and sent by an extragalactic friend, as this galaxy closely resembles our own.(more…)

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, the mission team has put together this image showing just a sample of the millions of galaxies that have been imaged by WISE during its survey of the entire sky.(more…)

This band is the disk of our spiral galaxy. Since we are inside this disk, the band appears to encircle the Earth. The above spectacular picture of the Milky Way arch, however, goes where the unaided eye cannot. Photographer Juan Carlos Casado.(more…)